Boot Finance LitePaper

Authors: chickenpie347, sabretooth, denett, deltatiger, cider

Abstract

Boot Finance is a project that is focused on an AMM that lets other projects control their own liquidity, with the eventual goal of being the primary AMM/DEX for the majority of projects in Defi.

As the majority of defi infrastructure moves to L2s over the coming months/years, the existing DEX/AMM ecosystem will be disrupted. It’s the thesis of Boot Finance that the current AMM dex landscape with one-size-fits-all solutions cannot persist as projects move to L2s. As gas costs reduce, there is a reduced need for massive single source liquidity pools(the main competitive metric right now in DEXes), as arb bots can inexpensively arb the price across multiple liquidity sources. Many projects will want both the advantages of custom AMMs that provide features/parameters that are governed by the project itself, along with the ability to manage their LP positions in traditional DEXes across the entire EVM L2 landscape.

Problems with current AMM/DEX market structure;

  1. Crypto projects are extremely reflexive, poor token price performance can adversely affect the fundamentals of a project and vice versa. Projects spend inordinate amounts of dev time focusing on tasks that enhance their token price. Endless amounts of time are spent optimizing token distributions, vesting schedules, bonding price curves, etc… Yet the one thing that affects the price the most, the X*Y constant product swap curve present in nearly all AMMs, warrant nary a second glance.
  2. The most profitable projects in crypto are all related to exchanges of some sort from CEXes to Dexes, to derivatives CExes and Dexes, etc… There is a massive value leak from projects whose tokens are being speculated on and generating massive value for exchanges of one kind or another, none of this value is flowing back to each project.

Boot Finance proposes a two-pronged L2 native tooling for AMMs.

  1. Stableswap public AMM - traditional AMM as seen by Uniswap/Curve, as L2s proliferate, there is a desperate need for stableswap solutions on newer EVM chains.
  2. Project controlled AMMs - projects can take control of their own token price, by designing their token swap curves just as carefully as they design their presale bonding curves. Helping projects “in-source” their liquidity provision, will not only allow a project to transparently market make their own token trades but also drives significant speculation revenue back into the project itself.

Background and Motivation

The core team of Boot Finance is comprised of some of the earliest contributors and supporters of Swerve Finance (a fork of Curve Finance). Having been with Swerve Finance behind the scenes since the day of launch, witnessing the meteoric rise of TVL to almost $1B, and then dealing with the complications that arose from a sharp drop in LP rewards, and finally, as the lead dev abandoned the project.

We bring with us the many lessons learned from the launch, operations, crisis management, and rescue operations at Swerve Finance.

Table of Contents

Problem

Token price affects the fundamentals of a project

Constant Product AMMs such as Uniswap and Sushiswap dominate the DEX market today. The reason is that they have a simple product that involves minimal gas cost, hence they prevailed over traditional order book exchanges that while dominating in CEX space, have excessive gas requirements to succeed on L1s.

Constant product AMMs are not the preferred swap curves for nearly all projects. Examine how projects conduct their public sales, very few of them use a constant product swap curve. Projects that want to do price discovery during the public sale, often resort to a “bonding curve” or some sort of “auction mechanism” as the preferred option.